Lancelot n : (Arthurian legend) one of the
knights of the Round Table; friend of King Arthur until (according
to some versions of the legend) he became the lover of Arthur's
wife Guinevere [syn: Sir
Lancelot]

Proper noun

In the Arthurian
legend, Sir Lancelot (Lancelot du Lac, also Launcelot) is one
of the
Knights of the Round
Table. In most of the French prose romances and works, he is
characterized as the greatest and most trusted of Arthur's knights
(at one point is called 'the most talked about knight now living),
and plays a part in many of Arthur's victories – but Arthur's
eventual downfall is also brought about in part by Lancelot, whose
affair with Arthur's wife Guinevere
destroys the unity of Arthur's court.

Lancelot is a very popular character. To the
great majority of English readers the name of no knight of King
Arthur's court is so familiar as is that of Sir Lancelot. The
mention of Arthur and the Round Table at once brings him to mind to
moderns as the most valiant member of that brotherhood and the
secret lover of the Queen. Lancelot, however, is not an original
member of the cycle, and the development of his story is still a
source of considerable disagreement between scholars.

Early prose and poetry

Lancelot was the only child of the great King
Ban
(Pant) of Benoic (Genewis) and
his queen Helaine
(Clarine). While yet an infant, his father was driven from his
kingdom, either by a revolt of his subjects, caused by his own
harshness (Lanzelet), or by the action of his enemy Claudas de la
Deserte (Lancelot). King and queen flee, carrying the child with
them, and while the wife is tending her husband, who dies of a
broken heart on his flight, the infant is carried off by a friendly
water-fay, the Lady of
the Lake, who brings the boy up in her mysterious kingdom. In
the German poem this is a veritable “Isle of
Maidens,” where no man ever enters, and where it is perpetual
spring. In the prose Lancelot, on the other hand, the Lake is but a
mirage, and the Lady's court does not lack its complement of
gallant knights; moreover the boy has the companionship of his
cousins, Lionel and Bors (sons of his father's younger brother
Bors), who, like himself, have been driven from their kingdom by
Claudas. When he reaches the customary age (fifteen or eighteen by
different texts and calculations), the young Lancelot, suitably
equipped, is sent out into the world. In both versions his name and
parentage are unknown to him. In Lanzelet he lacks all knightly
accomplishments (not unnatural when we remember he has here been
brought up entirely by women) and his inability to handle a steed
is emphasized. He rides forth in search of what adventure may
bring. In the prose Lancelot he goes with a fitting escort and
equipment to Arthur's court, where the Lady of the Lake asks that
he be knighted.

The subsequent adventures differ widely, but in
both tales he rides about the land accompanied by a woman who later
abandons him, and in both he eventually learns his true name and
lineage, regaining his rightful heritage peaceably because none
dares stand against him. But in the Prose Lancelot the tale is
extended by a description of Claudas' war against the Knights of
the Round Table, in which neither side gains the upper hand until
word comes that Arthur and Lancelot themselves are coming with
reinforcements. Claudas immediately flees alone into exile.

In Lanzelet the hero then reigns in peace over a
land inherited though his wife Iblis, while King Ban's kingdom is
ruled by an uncle. Both Lancelot and his wife live to see their
children's children, and they die on the same day. The whole of
Lanzelet has much more the character of folklore than that of a
knightly romance.

In the prose version, Lancelot, from his first
appearance at court, conceives a passion for the queen, who is very
considerably his senior, his birth taking place some time after her
marriage to Arthur. This infatuation colours his whole later
career. He frees her from imprisonment in the castle of Meleagant, who
kidnapped her (a similar adventure is related in Lanzelet, where he
fights a duel against a would-be abductor Valerin, but when Valerin
later succeeds in taking the queen, Lanzelet is not the rescuer).
Although he recovers his kingdom from Claudas, he prefers to remain
a simple knight of Arthur's court along with his cousins and
illegitimate half-brother Hector de
Maris who also refused to retire from knighthood to take on
lordship. Tricked into a liaison with the Fisher King's
daughter (called Elaine in
a few later texts), he becomes the father of Galahad, the
Grail
winner, and, as a result of the queen's jealous anger at his
relations with the lady, goes mad (for the third time), and remains
an exile from the court for some years. He takes part in the Grail
quest, but is granted only a fleeting glimpse of the sacred Vessel;
this induces unconsciousness that lasts for as many days as he has
spent years in sin. Finally, his relations with Guinevere are
revealed to Arthur by King
Lot's sons except for Gawain, Guerrehet and
Gaheriet
(in Malory Gawain, Gaheris, and Gareth), who take no part in the
disclosure. Surprised together with the queen, Lancelot escapes,
and the queen is condemned to be burnt at the stake. As her death
sentence is about to be carried out, Lancelot and his kinsmen come
to the queen's rescue, but in the fight that ensues many of
Arthur's knights, including three of Gawain's brothers, are slain.
Now Lancelot's enemy, Gawain urges Arthur to wage war against him,
and there follows a desperate struggle between Arthur and the race
of Ban. This is interrupted by an invasion of Gaul by the Romans.
But no sooner has Arthur defeated the Romans than tidings come of
Mordred's
treachery. Lancelot, taking no part in the last fatal conflict,
outlives both the king and queen, as well as the downfall of the
Round Table. Finally, retiring to a hermitage, he ends his days in
the odour of sanctity.

The process whereby the independent hero of the
Lanzelette - who has only minimal contact with Arthur, and who is
the faithful husband of Iblis - was converted into the principal
ornament of Arthur's court and the devoted lover of the queen, is
by no means easy to follow, nor do other works of the cycle explain
the transformation. In the pseudo-chronicles, the Historia of
Geoffrey and the translations by Robert Wace
and Layamon, Lancelot
does not appear at all; the queen's lover, whose guilty passion is
fully returned, is Mordred.

Chrétien
de Troyes' treatment of Lancelot is contradictory; in Erec and
Enide, his earliest extant poem, Lancelot's name appears as
third on the list of the knights of Arthur's court. (Of course
Gawain is
first and Erec, the hero of the tale, is second, so third position
indicates Lancelot's general high status.) In Chrétien's Cligès Lancelot
actually makes an appearance as one of the formidable knights the
story's hero must overcome. In
Le Chevalier de la Charrette, however, which followed Cligès,
Lancelot is the hero of the poem and therefore of course the best
knight of the court, and also the queen's lover; this is precisely
the position he occupies in the prose romance, where the section
dealing with this adventure is, as Gaston Paris
clearly proved, an almost literal adaptation of Chrétien's poem.
The subject of the poem is the rescue of the queen from her
abductor Meleagant; and
what makes the matter more perplexing is that Chrétien handles the
situation as if his audience were already familiar with it: it is
Lancelot, not Arthur, to whom the role of rescuer naturally
belongs. In
Perceval, le Conte du Graal, Chrétien's last work, Lancelot
does not appear at all, although much of the action takes place at
Arthur's court. In the Continuations added at various times to
Chrétien's unfinished work, the role assigned to Lancelot is also
modest. Among the fifteen knights selected by Arthur to accompany
him to Chastel
Orguellous he only ranks ninth. In a Tristan episode
inserted by Gerbert
de Montreuil in his continuation, Lancelot is one of the
knights publicly overthrown and shamed by Tristan.

Nowhere outside of Le Chevalier de la Charette is
Lancelot treated with anything approaching the importance assigned
to him in the prose romances. Welsh tradition does
not know him (Roger
Sherman Loomis posited that Lancelot derived from the character
Lloch Llawwynnyawc or Lugh Llenlleawg found in Culhwch
and Olwen and referenced in the poems Pa Gur and
Preiddeu
Annwfn, and claimed he could be traced back to Lleu Llaw
Gyffes or even the Celtic
godLugh
or Lugus, but
this view is no longer widely accepted). Nor do early Italian records -
which have preserved the names of Arthur and Gawain - make any
reference to Lancelot. What appears to be the most probable
solution is that Lancelot was the hero of an independent and widely
diffused folk-tale, which, owing to certain special circumstances,
was brought into contact with, and incorporated into, the Arthurian
tradition. This has been proved of the adventures recounted in the
Lanzelet: the theft of an infant by a water-fairy, the appearance
of the hero at a tournament on three consecutive days in three
different disguises, and the rescue of a queen or princess from an
Other-World prison are all features of a well-known and widespread
folk-tale, variants of which are found in almost every land, and
numerous examples of which have been collected by Emmanuel
Cosquin in his Contes Lorrains, and by J. F.
Campbell in his Tales of the West Highlands.

The story of the love between Lancelot and
Guinevere
as related by Chrétien has nothing spontaneous and genuine about
it; in no way can it be compared with the story of Tristan and
Iseult. It
is the exposition of a relationship governed by artificial and
arbitrary rules, to which the principal actors in the drama must
perforce conform. Chrétien states that he composed the poem (which
he left to be completed by Godefroi
de Leigni) at the request of the countess Marie de
Champagne, who provided him with matière et san. Marie was the
daughter of Louis
VII of France and of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, subsequently wife of Henry
II of Anjou and England.
Both mother and daughter were active agents in fostering the view
of the social relations of the sexes which found its most famous
expression in the "Courts of
Love", and which was responsible for the dictum that love
between husband and wife was impossible. The logical conclusion
appears to be that the Charrette poem is a Tendenz-Schrift,
composed under particular conditions in response to a special
demand. The story of Tristan and Iseult, immensely popular as it
was, was too genuine to satisfy the taste of the court for which
Chrétien was writing. Moreover, the Arthurian story was the popular
story of the day, and Tristan did not belong to the magic circle,
although he was ultimately brought within its bounds. The Arthurian
cycle must have its own love-tale; Guinevere, the leading lady of
that cycle, had to have a lover like the courtly ladies of the day,
so one had to be found for her. Lancelot, already popular hero of a
tale in which an adventure parallel to that of the Charrette
figured prominently, was pressed into service. Mordred,
Guinevere's earlier lover, was too unsympathetic a character;
moreover, he was required for the final role of traitor.

But to whom is the story to be assigned? Here we
must distinguish between Lancelot proper and the Lancelot/Guinevere
versions; so far as the latter are concerned, we cannot trace it
any further than Chrétien's version. Nowhere prior to the
composition of the Chevalier de la Charrette is there any evidence
of the existence of such a story. Yet Chrétien does not claim to
have invented the situation. Did it spring from the fertile brain
of some court lady - Marie or another? The authorship of the
Lancelot
proper, on the other hand, is frequently ascribed to Walter Map,
the chancellor of Henry
II, as are the majority of the Arthurian prose romances.
However, Walter had died before the prose Lancelot could have been
composed. Some, however, accept Map as the possible author of a
Lancelot romance that formed the basis for later developments, and
there is a growing tendency to identify this hypothetical original
Lancelot with the source of the German Lanzelet. The author,
Ulrich
von Zatzikhoven, tells us that he translated his poem from a
French (welsches) book in the possession of
Hugo de Morville, one of the English hostages who, in 1194,
replaced Richard
Coeur de Lion in the prison of
Leopold V of Austria.

To the student of the earliest medieval Arthurian
romances, Lancelot is an infinitely less interesting hero than
Gawain, Perceval or
Tristan, each of whom possesses a well-marked personality, and is
the centre of what we may call individual adventures. Except for
his being stolen and brought up by a water-fairy (the whole story
probably started from a Lai relating this adventure ), there is
nothing much in the material common to the French and German tales
to distinguish Lancelot from any other romantic hero of the
period.

But in the Perlesvaus,
possibly the earliest French prose Arthurian romance, Lancelot's
love affair with Guinevere suddenly re-emerges and Lancelot plays a
part in this Grail romance almost equal to that of Perceval the
hero and Gawain. But in this romance, Lancelot - unlike Perceval,
Gawain and Arthur - never sees the Grail.

The language of the prose Lancelot itself is
good, easy and graceful, but except for the earlier sections
involving Lancelot and his friend Galehot, most of
Lancelot's own adventures lack originality and interest. Situations
repeat themselves in a wearisome manner. English readers who know
the story only through the medium of Malory's prose and
Tennyson's verse have an impression entirely different from
that produced by the original literature. The Lancelot story, in
its rise and development, belongs exclusively to the later stage of
Arthurian romance; it was a story for the court, not for the folk,
and it lacks both the dramatic force and human appeal of the
genuine popular tale.

The prose Lancelot was frequently printed;
J. C.
Brunet chronicles editions of 1488, 1494, 1513, 1520 and 1533;
there are two from this last date, one published by Jehan Petit,
the other by Philippe
Lenoire; the Lenoire edition is far better, being printed from
a much fuller manuscript. There is now a critical edition in nine
volumes by Alexandre Micha, as well as an edition by Elspeth
Kennedy of an alternative Old French version. There is also a
translation into English by a team of scholars directed by Norris
J. Lacy; the only version available for the general reader of
French is the modernized and abridged text published by Paulin Paris
in vols. iii. to v. of
Romans de la Table Ronde. A Dutch
verse translation of the 13th century was published by W. J.
A. Jonckbloet in 1850, under the title of Roman
van Lanceleet. This begins with what Paulin Paris terms the
Agravain
section, the whole previous part with Guinevere's rescue from
Meleagant having been lost; but the text is an excellent one,
agreeing closely with the Lenoire edition of 1533. The Books
devoted by Malory to Lancelot are also drawn from this latter
section of the romance; there is no sign that the English
translator had any of the earlier part before him. Malory's version
of the Charrette adventure differs in many respects from any other
extant form, and the source of this special section of his work is
still a question of debate among scholars.

Further reading

Lancelot and the Grail: A Study of the Prose Lancelot, Elspeth
Kennedy (Clarendon Press, 1986)

Lancelot Do Lac, the Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance, Two
Volumes, Elspeth Kennedy (ed.) (OUP, 1980)

Modern interpretations

In the modern world, interpretations
of Lancelot have varied with him most stereotypically being
portrayed in novels and film as a near-perfect warrior, skilled,
handsome, and charismatic. In most films, Guinevere and Arthur are
the same age as Lancelot.

In books

In Bernard
Cornwell's The
Warlord Chronicles, Lancelot is depicted as Galahad's cowardly
older brother, who nevertheless has an impossibly grand reputation
as a heroic fighter thanks to his mother commissioning a great many
poems in his honour.

Lancelot's modern incarnation in Meg Cabot's
young adult novel Avalon High
is Lance, an attractive high school football player.

In the light novel Fate/Zero,
Lancelot was summoned the servant Berserker
to fight in the Holy Grail War. Upon his defeat by Saber,
he said that he had wanted his king to strike him down to atone for
his sins like a faithful knight

In the young adults book Shalott, by Felicity Pulman, 5 young
Australians are sent back in time to king Arthur's court to try and
change history and tennyson's poem on the Lady of
Shalott(Astolat)

In the 1975 comedy film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "Sir Lancelot the Brave"
(played by John Cleese)
is a marvellously violent knight known to attack castle walls, farm
animals, wedding guests, and flowers. At the end of the film, he is
the first one to cross the Bridge of Death, but is ultimately
arrested by police looking for the murderer of the historian
shortly afterwards. In the 2005 Broadway
version of this film, Spamalot,
Lancelot's quest leads him to discover that he is gay and ends up "marrying" the
effeminate Prince Herbert (his homosexuality was alluded to during
the end of Galahad's quest in the original movie where Galahad
accused Lancelot of being gay, but the latter claimed that he's
not).

In John
Boorman's 1981 film, Excalibur,
Lancelot (Nicholas
Clay) is portrayed much in the same manner as in Malory, but
carries out actions usually assigned to other knights. Like
Tristan he
is sent to escort the king's betrothed and falls in love with her
on the way. When Arthur (Nigel Terry)
first meets Lancelot the two fight and Excalibur is
broken (but later fixed by the Lady of
the Lake). This reflects Arthur's fight with King Pellinore in
Malory, where he breaks the Sword from the Stone and the Lady
replaces it with Excalibur. Later, Arthur discovers the lovers in a
forest, but spares them, leaving Excalibur standing between their
bodies (again, from the legends of Tristan and Isolde, and similar
to Pelleas' response to finding his love in the arms of Gawaine).
Lancelot is driven mad by remorse, and lives as a wild man (Much as
he does in Malory, and like Tristan, who temporarily suffered from
amnesia - and a similar remorse-fuelled period of madness occurs to
Lancelot in T. H. White's Once and Future King series) during the
quest for the Grail. Later,
he re-emerges during the final battle against Mordred, where he
dies, reconciled with Arthur.

In the 1995 film First
Knight, Lancelot (Richard
Gere), comes to the court of King Arthur (Sean
Connery) as a fearless fighter without master.
He rescues Guinevere (Julia
Ormond) from Sir Malagant's
brigands early in the film and falls in love with her at their
first meeting. Following the death of Arthur, Lancelot and
Guinevere marry and rule the kingdom justly. Notably, Arthur is
noticeably older than both Lancelot and Guinevere.

In the 2004 film King
Arthur, Lancelot (Ioan
Gruffudd) is portrayed as an atheist, in contrast to Arthur
(Clive
Owen), who is a devout Catholic, though a
follower of the Pelagian heresy.
Lancelot is also a Sarmatian, whose
origins are of the Black Sea area of Eastern Europe. He is forced
into service in Britain by
tradition of the Roman
Empire. In this version, his affair with Guinevere is almost
non-existent - there is clearly chemistry, but they never act on
their attraction.

In the 2007 film Shrek the
Third, Lancelot is seen as the high school's head jock who
bullies Artie and makes him the dummy in jousting training (voiced
by John
Krasinski).